"My mother…" Percy began, looking not at Lucius but at the candle that burned on the table between them. It was storming again, rain lashing against the crests of the waves.
Lucius tilted his head, listening, out of focus in Percy's sight, candlelight glowing on his hair like moonlight on clouds.
"My mother has a clock with a hand for everyone at the Burrow. It shows where they are, all the time - at work, at school, traveling somewhere. She bought it when You-Know-Who began to become powerful, when people were first realizing what a threat he was." They'd eaten cabbage for a month, because it was in season and grew in their garden. "She made the clockmaker put a mark on it for 'Mortal Peril.' I remember her checking it all the time, whenever one of us was out of her sight."
He smoothed a hand over his parchment - a good foot written, there'd be no exasperated looks from the Minister this time. No gentle remonstrances over a task that was not only not part of Percy's job but also utterly pointless if the Ministry still refused to take official note of Death Eater activity.
"She had a little ritual that she did - she'd look at the clock twice, look and look away and look back, as if she were double-checking. When she was upset or unhappy she'd look three times. Once Bill enchanted the clock so that the hands just spun 'round…"
"I don't imagine he did it more than once, did he?" Lucius asked quietly.
Percy had been very young when Bill enchanted the clock, and the memory of his mother's reaction was one of his worst memories of growing up. It was still painful even now, full of that odd power childhood memories possess to make the rememberer a child again. Percy hadn't liked being a child the first time around.
He should have made up a memory, invented something out of whole cloth - but Lucius would have known, and it wouldn't have been right anyway; a poor way to repay cooperation, with deliberate lies. "That's what I remember about that time. The clock, and not being allowed to go outside to play."
"And yet your family is pureblood," Lucius pointed out. "Your father was a minor government functionary who did not at the time have the authority to order raids or property seizures. You lived in an out-of-the-way hamlet in Devon. Objectively speaking, your risk of being targeted by Death Eaters was very low."
"We were afraid," Percy told him. "Everyone was afraid."
"Yes," Lucius said with an odd finality in his voice, as if they had come to the end of a difficult puzzle. "The Dark Lord's methods might be crude, his aims might be irrational, but he has a certain skill for pinpointing the ways in which an enemy can be made to use his own weaknesses against himself. To win a battle, we are told, know your enemy and know yourself. Voldemort might have been stopped much sooner had his enemies paid attention to the latter half of that axiom, instead of being rescued in spite of themselves by an infant and a fluke of chance."
"Why did he go back underground?" Percy asked.
"Because even he learns from his mistakes. He struck too soon, from a position of weakness. He should have waited."
Waited until… Percy's thoughts flew inexorably from past to present - the Ministry disorganized, communicating within itself too inefficiently, still denying that Voldemort was alive; Dumbledore gone and Snape unable to build the same kind of blindly loyal following even if he had deigned to try; the Order of the Phoenix full of men and women who were aging and war-weary. The Dark Mark back, and with increasing frequency.
Waited until now.
"I wonder, have you spoken to Bellatrix Lestrange?" Lucius asked, tracing a finger idly along the candle.
"I…" Percy swallowed convulsively. Five minutes with Bellatrix had given him nightmares for nearly a month. "I tried to interview her some time ago. She wasn't really in a fit state to answer questions."
Lucius' smile was lazy and cruel, catlike. "She's utterly mad, is that what you mean?"
"Yes."
"I can't say that I'm sorry. She frightened my son half to death, though he got the better of her in the end." The pride in Lucius' voice was simple and quiet, startlingly far from the aggressive bragging about family and lineage that Percy would have expected from a Malfoy. "It will be a blow to the Dark Lord, though. Even half-mad, Bellatrix was a potent weapon. I daresay she is even now, but she is no longer controllable, I'd wager."
"I don't see how she would be," Percy answered, trying to puzzle out what all this was leading up to.
Lucius folded his hands on the table. "Madness is frightening. We none of us know what we might become, what we might do, if we went mad, and none of us can promise ourselves that it will never happen. Voldemort's greatest weapon is fear."
"I'm afraid I don't understand, sir," Percy said finally.
"Go and see Bellatrix again, child," Lucius said. "Come back and tell me what you've learned, and I shall tell you a thing about the Dark Lord that I don't believe I've ever told anyone. It might help you understand the Death Eater activity; it might not. I leave it to you to judge its usefulness."
Percy tried hard to keep the excitement out of his face. If whatever Lucius was planning to tell him was something that the Ministry couldn't overlook, then there would be no more of this covering things up; no more waffling, no more burying their heads in the sand. Something would be done. "I'll do that, then."
"Know your enemy," Lucius said softly. "And know yourself."
Harry couldn't sleep. He was so exhausted that it felt less like exhaustion than like a sort of leaden desperation, and sleep wouldn't come. Discontent, he shifted onto his back and stared upward, trying to make out the lines of his canopy in the blurred darkness. He wasn't often lonely, but tonight he wanted someone sleeping next to him, just so that he could reach out a hand and feel the warm rise and fall of someone else's breath.
Strange that none of the Weasley siblings had followed in their parents' footsteps. Charlie was married now, to a tiny Romanian woman with huge eyes and a sunny smile who spoke almost no English, but by accident or design there were no children yet. Ron… well, he'd tried, hadn't he, and maybe one day he'd try again with someone else, but Harry didn't think he was going to be in any great hurry. Fred and George had dated Katie and Angelina for a while, but as of last summer had both been happily single again. Harry had asked Fred about it one day during the course of some conversation or other; Fred had laughed and said that they were too busy with the shop, and looked over toward where George was trying to get Ginny to test out a new kind of acid drops - Really, Gin, these only look like they're burning a hole in your tongue, it's a brilliant trick to play on people, they'll think your tongue's about to fall off -
Harry rubbed at his eyes. They felt like sandpaper. Maybe he should ask Malfoy for a sleeping potion.
Malfoy. It had been Malfoy, in their sixth year, taller now than most of their teachers, glowing like starlight in the dark green of his Quidditch gear, who had made Harry revise his estimate of his own sexuality from straight to mostly straight but willing to be convinced, or possibly straight unless your name is Draco Malfoy.
He had hated it.
Hated that his own body could so disastrously betray him; hated that if he had to find himself attracted to another man, it couldn't have been Ron, who would have patiently jollied him out of it; hated feeling helpless and powerless in the face of his own hormones. Hated the dreams, hated the feeling in the pit of his stomach, hated the way the breeze from the open window fluttered Malfoy's hair against his cheek when the weather was warm. He'd thought puberty was a pain in the arse, what with the sudden horrifying discovery that there seemed to be nothing on Earth incapable of giving him an erection; he wasn't sure that the discovery that Draco Malfoy, of all people, was beautiful wasn't worse.
It hadn't lasted. He'd dated Parvati, dated Hannah Abbot, briefly considered dating Fred or George or both before his sanity reasserted itself and pulled him back from the brink; and every interaction he had with Draco served to convince him further that Draco might have been breathtaking but he was also breathtakingly obnoxious, quite probably irredeemably evil, and a Malfoy to the bone. Before long he'd trained himself not to feel desire like a slap in the face when the wind tossed Malfoy's hair into disdainful grey eyes, or the rain glided drop by drop down the skin of that long, pale throat... and then everything had been all right again, and he had even managed to convince himself that he'd never really found anything remarkable at all in the porcelain beauty that should have been cold and was brilliantly, hotly alive instead.
And when all the other children passed notes in class on carelessly folded pieces of paper, when Malfoy with quick, deft fingers turned parchment into a crane and breathed it into living flight, Harry told himself Malfoy was only showing off, and almost believed it.
It was a cruel thing, to grow out of knowing everything and everyone. Even crueler was to find out that you'd been wrong all along, that you thought you'd banished the boggart in the closet only to find that it had been lurking unseen in the basement for years, and that it knew you all the better for living with you that long, for watching you in silence when you hadn't known it was there.
Harry blew out a dissatisfied breath and sat up, dragging a sheet with him as he got out of bed and padded over to the window seat. The nights were finally beginning to grow chill, and the glass of the window radiated cold against his skin. He sat down, slipped on his glasses, and pulled the sheet around his shoulders, looking out at the moonlight over the forest. There was just a little mist, wisps entangled in the tops of trees and glowing in the cold light like St. Elmo's fire on the top of a ship's mast.
What a bastard he'd been to Malfoy earlier, and all because he was afraid to say Let me in; don't leave; look at me. All because he was afraid that a hand reached out to Malfoy would be coolly, uninterestedly declined, and he'd have only himself to blame for that too. All because he didn't trust himself, and didn't trust Malfoy, and if Don't go had turned into Stay with me tonight, it would infallibly have ended in disaster.
He couldn't have touched Draco. Couldn't have reached out and threaded his fingers into ash-soft hair, couldn't have whispered Stay with me against the curve of Draco's ear. Draco wouldn't have turned to brush his lips against Harry's, mouth opening in soft welcome; and if he had, it wouldn't have felt like following the snitch into a lightning field. What he would probably have done, in fact, is hexed Harry right through the wall and left him there to die of mortification, and it would have been no more than Harry deserved.
Harry pulled the sheet tighter around his shoulders and leaned his head against the cool glass of the window. "Son of a bitch," he whispered, and began the weary work of convincing himself that he didn't really want Draco, all over again.
A rap right next to Harry's ear nearly made him flail off the window seat and onto the floor. Blinking in the sudden flood of light, he had a moment of oddly disconnected panic before he woke up enough to realize that sunlight was streaming into the room and there was an owl pecking impatiently at the glass. Heart pounding, Harry shoved his glasses back into position and opened the window.
The owl - Roquefort, who belonged to Hermione, or condescended to live with her at any rate - hopped inside, ruffling and smoothing his feathers pointedly. Settling onto the seat beside Harry, he extended a leg and suffered Harry to remove the attached parchment with a great air of martyrdom but no actual attempt to remove any of Harry's fingers. Harry unrolled the parchment with hands that were still shaking a little.
Harry, I'm sorry I left so soon yesterday - I really did want to chat with you and Remus. Tea this morning? I can be at Madam Puddifoot's by 11:00. Love, Hermione
Harry lifted his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, trying to wake up. "It's the crack of bloody dawn, Roquefort," he complained. "On Saturday."
Roquefort fixed him with a stern, beady eye before fluttering across the room to take up co-residence on Hedwig's perch. Hedwig shuffled sleepily over to make room.
"Oh, all right," he grumbled, wrapped the sheet around his shoulders, and stumbled over to his desk, stubbing his toe on the chair as he went.
Hermione, Love to. See you then. Harry
As an exemplar of the art of letter-writing it left a bit to be desired, but it would do well enough. He tied the parchment to Roquefort's leg, evaded a peck aimed at his knuckle that earned Roquefort a shrill scolding by Hedwig, and shooed Hermione's owl back out the window.
Coffee. Harry was in urgent, imperative need of coffee, or else a good strong cup of tea. A glance at the clock told him that it was not in fact the crack of dawn but just after 9:30, which gave him about an hour before he had to head down to Hogsmeade. He debated skipping the shower on the grounds that he'd gotten rained on the day before, but decided against it. Fifteen minutes later, more or less clean and a bit more awake, he pulled on his robes, attempted to browbeat his damp hair into some form of order, and headed for the faculty lounge, wondering why in all his years at Hogwarts he'd never seen a professor wandering the halls on weekend mornings looking like the walking dead. Surely they couldn't all be morning people.
Malfoy was already in the lounge, flipping through a Quidditch magazine with a French title. His eyes flicked up to Harry's for just a moment - what was that in them? Wariness? Or nothing at all? - before he murmured "Good morning, Potter," and returned his attention to the magazine.
Harry had been reaching for the tea. He changed his mind and reached past it to the coffee. "Good morning, Malfoy," he answered, grabbing for his Chudley Cannons mug where it hung on the wall and rather wishing it wasn't such a dire shade of orange. Malfoy's mug - which held tea, two sugars, no cream - was a dark, discreet Slytherin green.
Harry moved over to the sideboard and inspected breakfast. The bacon looked good, or maybe kippers, and possibly some scrambled eggs -
The door to the faculty lounge banged open and what appeared to be a small cerise whirlwind blew in, followed by three house elves staggering under a heavy load of luggage. Harry found his eyes on Malfoy and thought, for just a moment, So that's what he looks like when he's happy to see someone. Just that moment, and then Malfoy's expression was cool and uninterested again.
"Good morning, Pansy," he drawled. "What brings you here?"
"Ass," she said shortly, in a voice that didn't do as good a job of hiding fondness and pleasure as Draco's had. "I've come to lend you aid and comfort, of course. Where's the tea? I'm parched."
"Over there on the counter." Draco waved a hand. "How can you wear that color at this hour of the morning?"
"I'll have you know this is an original Zabini for Madam Malkin," she informed him. "Do you know how in-demand Blaise's designs are? And he likes this one on me. He said he'd hire me as a model if I weren't eight inches too short."
Harry hadn't seen Pansy much since they left school. She'd rather grown into her looks and wasn't quite so puglike now. She was small and chic, with perfect hair, flawless posture, and lovely skin. Harry took her as evidence that his desire to get behind Malfoy's defenses was not indicative of a willingness to get to know all Slytherins everywhere.
Most of Malfoy's attention had returned to his magazine. "Considering the monstrosities he sent his models down the runway in at Prague last season, I think I might consider that an offer to declare blood feud if I were you."
"Don't be ridiculous, Draco," she said cheerfully, appropriating a teacup that belonged to no one in particular and filling it with tea. "Those are just for fun. Blaise doesn't really expect anyone to walk around in fishnet robes with four-foot ruffs."
"Good God, I should hope not."
Pansy reached past Harry for a slice of buttered toast, apparently not noticing him any more than she had noticed the house elves who had trickled out one by one, probably to store her luggage in whatever room she was staying in. "But I do think -"
The door opened again and Neville slipped sideways into the room with a quick smile at Harry, holding a pot spilling over with dark-centered flowers in a dozen bright colors. "Erm," he said. "Good morning."
"Morning, Neville," Harry answered in tandem with Malfoy's politely murmured, "Good morning."
Neville straightened his shoulders, walked over to where Malfoy was sitting, and set the pot down on the table before him, rather clumsily - Neville had never quite outgrown his awkward gangliness, and it was worse when he was nervous. "I. Erm. I thought you might like these, Malfoy. For your room."
Malfoy looked up at him in surprise.
"They're… they're pansies," Neville clarified. His ears turned scarlet, and he avoided looking in Pansy's direction so obviously that he might as well have turned around and stared right at her.
Malfoy looked down at the flowers and reached out to turn a lavender petal delicately on his fingertip. For just a moment his face lit in a rather complicated expression that looked as if he were laughing ruefully at some private joke. "Thank you, Longbottom," he said finally. "I do like them."
"As I was saying," Pansy put in, setting her tea and toast down on the table, "Blaise - oh my, those are lovely. Longbottom, did you grow those?"
The flush began to creep down from Neville's ears onto his cheeks. "Yes. I've been working on some hybrids. Hoy, Harry, are you going somewhere?"
Bloody Malfoy and his pansies. Harry drained the last of his coffee and set his mug on the counter. "Going down to Hogsmeade. I'm meeting Hermione for tea."
"I'll walk with you a bit, shall I?" Neville asked, so clearly frantic for an excuse to leave before his blush got any worse that Harry didn't have the heart to refuse.
"Come on, then," he said agreeably, ushering Neville out of the room. When he looked back, Pansy was smiling at the flowers and Malfoy was smiling at Pansy, and if he hadn't known who they were it might almost have been sweet.
He didn't slam the door, but it was a near thing.
"My God, Neville. Pansy Parkinson?" Harry chided, laughing, when they were past the gates.
Neville turned scarlet. "Professor Snape made her work with me in Potions for three weeks in our fourth year. Whatever she did to deserve it, it must have been awful. But, you know, by the end of the three weeks she was… well, almost kind sometimes. The last day we worked together she told me a joke about a hag, a centaur, and the Sorting Hat that made me laugh so hard I almost got detention."
"Is that where that joke came from? I remember you told it in the common room for weeks."
"Until Minerva caught me telling it," Neville agreed. "I thought she was going to yank my ear right off. I was convinced she was going to tell my gran and I'd get the howler to end all howlers."
Harry rubbed absently at his own ear, remembering a good yank or two that had threatened to separate it from his head. "I'm bloody glad she doesn't do that anymore."
"Not to us, anyway. Listen, Harry, I'm turning off here. I need werewort and there's a patch of it up on top of the hill. Give my love to Hermione."
"Sure you won't join us?"
"I might do later. I've things I have to gather up first, for Poppy too."
"We'll be at the tea shop," Harry told him, and turned back down the road to Hogsmeade.
Even walking slowly, he was still early. Batting away a small floating jack-o'-lantern, he settled himself into a seat and sat looking out the window, wishing he'd brought a magazine, and arguing with himself over whether he had time to go and buy one at the newsagent's. He really didn't like Madam Puddifoot's; it always reminded him of his disastrous date with Cho Chang, which in turn reminded him of how shabbily he had treated her and the abject horse's arseness that had been Harry Potter, Age Fifteen. No one past the legal drinking age, Harry felt, should ever have to be reminded of what they'd been like at fifteen years old.
He had just decided to risk a run to the newsagent's when Hermione slid into the seat across from him, looking more worn and tired than he was used to seeing her. "Hullo, Harry," she said with a convincing attempt at brightness, signalling the waitress.
"Hi," Harry replied, and swallowed against a sudden, unhappy wave of protectiveness. Whether the lion's share of fault for the divorce was hers, Ron's, or no one's at all, Hermione deserved better than she'd gotten out of life so far. What the hell kind of world was it where you could do what you were best at, do everything you were supposed to, do it with all your heart, try to do some good in the world, and have it all come to nothing in the end? "How are you feeling?"
Hermione's face fell for a moment before she rallied. "Tired, that's all. And you?"
"The same," Harry answered, and glanced up as the waitress appeared by the table. "Tea, please."
"Bring us a pot of Darjeeling, please. And a tray of cakes," Hermione requested.
"Creamnsugar?" the waitress mumbled, not looking any too happy at being out of bed herself.
"Yes, please," Hermione answered.
The waitress disappeared into the depths of the tea shop and Hermione turned back to Harry. "You didn't stay at the Burrow last night?"
"No, I… I wouldn't have felt right." I wanted to come home. I wanted things to be all right. I don't know what I wanted.
Hermione smoothed her napkin absently with her fingers, straightening out the lines. "Molly invited me to come and stay as well, but I didn't like to either. It surprised me a bit. I don't think she was ever very enthusiastic about Ron and me." She gave a wan smile. "At least she didn't send me a tiny chocolate egg as a wedding present."
"Hermione, I'm sorry," Harry said quietly. "About the divorce, and… well, everything."
Hermione looked away. "It was for the best, you know. The divorce, I mean. Things were so different without you. We argued all the time, real arguments, the kind some little part of you can never quite forgive. I don't know, maybe we got married because we were too young and stupid to tell the difference between love and annoyance."
"But you did love him," Harry reminded her. If he was certain of nothing else, he was certain of that.
"I did," Hermione admitted; then, a harder admission, "I still do. But he's right - we can't live together. We'll be friends again one day. But not yet."
There had been a time when Harry and Ron had been the only friends Hermione had. She was a grown woman now, and had to have other friends, but suddenly Harry realized that he didn't know who they were. She never mentioned them.
The waitress reappeared balancing a tray with a teapot, cups and spoons, cream and sugar, and a small tiered structure containing teacakes frosted in lurid colors that made Harry's taste buds shrink in sheer self-defense. Fortunately there were small triangles of plain bread and butter amongst the neon, and after pouring tea for himself and Hermione he appropriated a couple of them. "Hermione… when was the last time you talked to Percy?"
"Do I know anything, you mean?" she asked, and Harry nodded. "I wish I did. I've racked my brains for something, anything - but I haven't spoken to Percy in so long. I heard through the grapevine when they started sending him to Azkaban; from what I could gather, he saw Walden Macnair once and Bellatrix Lestrange a couple of times but the only one who would talk to him was Lucius Malfoy, and even he wasn't very forthcoming."
"Why did they send him there to begin with?"
Hermione pursed her lips and stirred sugar into her tea. "Harry, you have to understand how few people at the Ministry really know what they're doing. Half the people there hold their positions because their fathers or mothers held it before them. They muddle along covering their backsides as best they can, and they've spent too many years following the example of a Minister who wouldn't admit he was wrong on New Year's Day if he'd said the world was going to end at Christmas. The Death Eaters are returning, and they won't admit it - they can't admit it, really, without confessing to twenty years of denial and coverups."
"So why send Percy to talk to the ones in prison?" Harry took a sip of his tea. The cakes might be terrifying but the tea was excellent.
"Well, I have a theory about that." Hermione took one of the less eyewatering cakes and set it neatly in the center of her plate. "It's really two questions, isn't it? Why the Ministry sent anyone at all, and why they sent Percy. The first part goes back to what I said about covering their backsides. I think they were hoping that Percy would find out that whoever was setting off the Dark Mark, it couldn't possibly be real Death Eaters. Percy's a pureblood, from an old and respectable family, and everyone knows that he and Arthur broke ties years ago; Fudge might have thought that Percy was the member of his staff most likely to get answers. And if they sent someone out there to question the Death Eaters, you see, then if - if something were to happen and they couldn't get away with denial anymore, then they could say that they'd been working on gathering intelligence the whole time, that they'd had one of their best men working on it, because Percy really was one of their best men. Second…"
"Second?" Harry prompted as Hermione took a bite of cake. She gave him a reproving look for his impatience and swallowed.
"Those cakes are much better than they look. Second, going back to the question of why they sent Percy in particular… well, you've met Fudge. Fudge is the king of the arse-covering muddlers."
"Hermione!" Harry spluttered, nearly snorting tea out his nose.
"Well, it's true, Harry. But Percy…" She glanced toward the counter, making sure no one was listening, and shooed away a floating jack-o'-lantern like the one that had almost bumped into Harry earlier. "Percy's quick and hard-working and very ambitious. It was no secret that he saw himself in the Minister's chair one of these days, and also no secret that he'd do a sight better a job than Fudge does. I think Fudge sent him on a fool's errand, and let him know that he was being sent on a fool's errand, to rein in his ambition a little."
"Well, that bloody backfired, didn't it?" Harry noted gloomily.
"I just want to know how Lucius did it," Hermione answered quietly. "One can't bribe Percy, or threaten him, or get him to do something he knows is wrong - if it were possible, God knows Fred and George would have found a way to do it years ago. But that does lead to the inescapable conclusion, doesn't it, that either Percy is… either Percy is dead too, or Lucius Malfoy hasn't gone to join the Dark Lord at all. I think, you know, I'd rather he had. There's a limit to how much damage he can do when he's only bowing and scraping to Voldemort. But…"
"But if he has, then he probably got a thousand miles from Azkaban, killed Percy, and dumped the body where no one will find it," Harry finished, raking his fingers dismally through his hair. "Percy wouldn't have taken kindly to being betrayed. He'd want to come back here and spill everything, and Malfoy wouldn't risk it."
"I think that would kill Molly," Hermione said simply. "She never wanted the estrangement between them, but Arthur was so adamant and Percy so angry… it would kill her, and I can't hope it's not true because of what the alternative might be. And I feel awful for saying that, because sometimes I think that - that Percy and I could have helped each other, and understood each other, and maybe smoothed each other's way a bit with the rest of the family, and maybe if I'd tried sooner this wouldn't have happened."
Harry smiled. "I remember you spent most of fourth year trying to smooth things over between me and Ron. Didn't work, did it? Weasleys are stubborn."
"And so are Potters," she informed him sternly. "But… I know what it's like, you know, to be in the middle of that big boisterous family that feels like it ought to welcome everyone in and doesn't always. It's very lonely. I can only imagine how Percy must have felt growing up in it."
Harry watched with a pang as she looked away and busied herself topping off her tea. "I didn't know it was like that."
"Well, there was no use saying anything about it, was there?" Hermione pointed out. "It wouldn't have fixed anything and would only have upset Ron. But that isn't the point anyway. We were talking about Percy and Lucius, and Lucius' plans."
"Maybe Malfoy doesn't have any evil plans, though," Harry argued. "Maybe he just wanted to be free. Maybe he's gone to live in the south of France on his family's money, growing vineyards and lounging around in the sun reading Proust, and he's let Percy come with him as a reward."
"And maybe instead of facing one Dark Lord we'll be caught between two."
Harry slipped a hand under his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. "Jesus, Hermione. There have been a lot of times when I've hoped you were wrong, but never quite as much as now."
There was a small flash of hurt in her eyes, quickly covered. "Well, I'm not wild about the idea myself, you know," she said a bit stiffly. "But I do think it's a possibility we should consider."
"I didn't mean -" Harry sighed and reached out to touch his fingertips to hers, and saw her color a little. "I'm sorry, Hermione. I've spent all morning thinking how I'd like to be able to make things better for you and now I've hurt your feelings."
"Oh, no, really, you didn't -"
"I -"
"- and anyway, that's not what's important," she said firmly. "What's important is that we figure out what's going on. The rest of it can wait." But she smiled anyway, looking pleased and oddly shy, turning her gaze down toward where their hands rested on the tablecloth.
Harry nodded. "What is it that makes you think Lucius is going to -"
"Shh," Hermione hissed suddenly, and a moment later the door to the tea shop swung open to admit Draco, Pansy, and a plethora of shopping bags.
" - can get my uncle Rory to do the decorating for the reception, that'll make him feel useful," Pansy was prattling as they approached the counter.
Draco looked pained. "Pansy, my mother will be there."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"The last time your uncle decorated for a reception - dear God, did someone ice these cakes under a gaslight? - he strewed ice sculptures of enormously priapic centaurs all over the place and called it high concept art. The time before that it was huge photographs of infants dressed like flowers. The man is a hack."
"Well, yes," Pansy conceded. "But I do think if we just give him proper instructions -"
"Pansy. No. We'll hire in from London."
"Oh, well, I suppose you're right," Pansy sighed, patting Draco on the cheek. "Though I shouldn't say it. You're supposed to let the bride and her mother have absolutely free rein, you know."
Harry's cup froze halfway to his mouth, and suddenly there wasn't enough air.
"And I will, too, as long as you don't ask your uncle to decorate or try to dress the wedding party in Blaise's runway fashions," Draco answered.
Harry finished lifting his cup to his mouth, took a drink, swallowed carefully, and set the cup back down, centering it exactly on the saucer. There was a pattern of yellow roses around the brim. He hadn't noticed it before.
"Of course not, they'll be - oh." There was a moment of hesitation; but Pansy was not the daughter of a pureblood oligarch and a socialite for nothing, and after that brief hesitation had passed Harry heard her footsteps approaching their table.
"Good morning, Potter, Granger," she said, her tone flawlessly neutral.
"Good morning," Hermione said in a tight, icy voice.
Draco came up to stand behind Pansy, towering over her. Harry could have looked at him, but was distracted by the slight hint of malevolent glee that had sparked in Pansy's eyes at the tone of Hermione's voice. It faded quickly, though, into something that looked oddly thoughtful.
"I," Harry began, then cleared his throat to stall for time and another breath or two. "I hear congratulations are in order."
Pansy gave him a puzzled look. "For the wedding? We've been engaged for a year now. Draco never said anything about it, I see."
"I prefer to keep my personal life personal," Draco said, sounding a little annoyed - with Harry or Pansy, Harry wasn't sure.
Harry wrapped his hand more carefully around his teacup. The cups were thin bone china, fragile, and would break easily. He wouldn't want that.
"You're both invited, of course," Pansy said with consummate insincerity.
Harry had never actually heard anyone choke down a horrified protest before. It was, he decided, an interesting sound.
"That's kind of you," Hermione answered just as insincerely. "I'm afraid we wouldn't know anyone."
"We'd have to invite Longbottom to keep them company," Draco observed, having apparently cleared the protest out of his throat.
"Well, I don't mind if we do," Pansy answered with a sudden spirited temper that made everyone look at her in surprise. "He brought me those lovely flowers this morning."
Draco smiled wryly and brushed a hand against Pansy's hair. "Of course we'll invite Longbottom, my sweet, if you want him there," he said quietly, real tenderness underlying his voice, and what was it about his expression that was nagging at Harry?
Pansy smiled the triumphant smile of a Slytherin getting her own way and turned back to Harry and Hermione. "We'll be on our way, then. Enjoy the day. It's quite a lovely one, isn't it?"
They left the tea shop in a whirl of shopping bags and Pansy's chatter, and the silence that fell in their wake was hot and smothering. Finally Hermione broke it, her voice a little too loud as she said, "I suppose they didn't want tea after all."
"Probably didn't want to wait for the waitress to reappear," Harry answered, and looked up. Hermione was as white as a sheet, eyes fixed on her teacup, fingertips trembling against the china. "Hermione, what's the matter?"
Hermione took a shaky breath. "She feels sorry for me, you know."
Harry frowned. "Who, Pansy?"
"Yes. I can see it when she looks at me. She feels sorry for me, not in that gloating 'ha ha isn't it awful to be you' way but really - really pities me for some reason. And I can't bear it, Harry, not from her!" Hermione snatched up her napkin and, to Harry's horror, burst into tears.
He reached over and took her hand, squeezing tight, horribly at sea. "Hermione, love, why do you care what Pansy bloody Parkinson thinks of you?"
Hermione shook her head, sobbing harder into her napkin. Harry sat helplessly watching her struggle for control until her tears finally shuddered to a halt and she crumpled the napkin in her hand, not quite looking at him.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I don't know what came over me, I'm sure."
"My God, Hermione, it isn't like you haven't had reason to cry," Harry said, letting go of her hand to pour her some more tea. "You've had an awful time of things lately and -"
"Harry, promise me something," she said in a tight, brittle voice.
"Sure. What is it?"
"Promise me you'll think with your head and not with your heart. Promise me you won't forget who Draco Malfoy is, and who he was, and what he's done."
Harry blinked at her in incomprehending astonishment. "I don't understand."
"Oh, Harry -" she snapped, then closed her eyes, visibly reining in her temper. "No, I suppose you don't, do you? Never mind. Promise me anyway, whether you understand or not."
"I promise, of course I do. But Hermione, he's -"
"Don't you dare, Harry Potter!" she interrupted shrilly. "Don't you dare make excuses for the boy who said Cedric Diggory deserved to die and thought for seven years that my name was Mudblood -"
"I'm not!" Harry protested, raising his voice over hers. The waitress poked her head out of the back room, gave them a scandalized glance, and disappeared into the inner sanctum again. Harry didn't care. "I'm not making excuses for the boy, Hermione. I'm saying that there's more to the man than I ever thought there was to the boy. I thought I knew him, I thought I knew him inside and out, and I don't."
Hermione looked away, furious. Harry sat back and rubbed his hands over his face angrily. How in the hell had a few off-the-cuff words from Pansy Parkinson managed to upset Hermione this much?
"Look," he said more quietly. "I thought I knew all about him and I was wrong. I thought I knew everything, and I don't know anything. I've lost the fucking plot, Hermione, and I feel like if I can just understand Malfoy then I'll understand everything. I feel like I'm so close to understanding, you know? But it all has to be second-hand, because he shows things to other people that he won't show to me because I'm Harry bloody Potter, the Boy Who Pissed Him Off When We Were Eleven Years Old, and I can't stand being on the outside of things wondering what the hell's going on when it seems like everything would make sense if someone would just tell me."
"Oh, Harry," Hermione sighed, her voice so heavy with disappointment that hurt and anger flared hot in Harry again.
"I'm allowed to try to make sense of my world, Hermione. Draco Malfoy is part of that world."
"You don't see, do you? It isn't that. It isn't that at all." Hermione rummaged clumsily in her purse and tossed some money onto the table; it spun in a shaft of sunlight, flashing in Harry's eyes. "I have to go."
"Hermione!" Harry reached out and caught her hand. "Don't… don't go away angry, all right? I promised, and I'll listen to what you said. You always know better than I do anyway."
Hermione blinked a few times, then gave him a rueful smile. "I didn't mean to be so sharp about it. I'm more upset than I thought I was, that's all. But Harry, do remember, and be careful."
"I will," Harry answered, letting her hand slide through his. "Promise."
She stood, bent to give him a brief kiss on the cheek, and then left, leaving the faint scent of roses behind her. Harry sighed and poured himself another cup of tea; he needed all the fortification he could bloody well get at the moment.
Christ, what a day, he thought, leaned his elbows on the table, and covered his eyes with his hands.
"All right, Harry?" Neville asked cautiously, sliding into the seat across from him.
Harry lifted his face out of his hands, blinked at the light, and forced a wan smile. "Know what, Neville? I don't bloody care if I never see another cup of Darjeeling again as long as I live, and I'm afraid to try those cakes. Let's go to the pub."
"That bad, was it?"
"First round's mine," Harry told him, and shoved his chair back.
The Three Broomsticks was gratifyingly empty. With her usual tact, Rosmerta plunked two pints of lager down in front of them and went to clean the glasses at the far side of the bar. Harry picked up his pint and took a huge swig, and damned if that didn't hit the spot better than tea and radioactive cakes.
He wondered if Draco was dying for a pint after a morning of shopping with Pansy, or if the Malfoy taste buds were too posh for lager. Then he caught himself wondering, scowled in annoyance, and took another drink.
"What happened?" Neville asked.
"God, I don't even know." Harry rubbed a hand across his forehead. "We ran into Draco and Pansy Parkinson, or rather they ran into us. Pansy managed to infuriate Hermione by… well, just by existing, apparently, and then the two of them left and the next thing I knew Hermione and I were having some sort of row about Draco."
"Oh, I thought you meant Hermione and Pansy left. That would've been a bit odd, wouldn't it?" Neville took a thoughtful drink. "A row about Draco, huh?"
"Did you know that he and Pansy…" Harry trailed off and looked down into his pint. "I mean, that they're engaged."
"I knew," Neville answered quietly, then glanced up at Harry with a good imitation of his usual cheery smile. "Goyle told me, you know."
"Goyle?" Good God, was the entire universe in on some conspiracy to cram Slytherin House under Harry's nose?
"I ran into him in Diagon Alley over the summer. Really ran into him, I mean - wasn't looking where I was going when I came out of Pigsworthy's Pots and Plants. It was like bumping into Cornwall."
Harry snorted.
"Anyway, we helped each other pick up our things and get them sorted out, and he showed me a really quite nice set of silver candlestick holders that he'd bought. He said it was a wedding present for the two of them."
Only Neville, Harry thought wryly, could have run full-tilt into a man who from the ages of eleven to eighteen had existed solely for the purpose of breaking other people's bones with his forehead and ended up having a nice chat between old schoolmates. One of these days Harry was going to have to ask him how he did that. "Candlestick holders don't quite seem like a Goyle present, do they?"
"Oh, I imagine he just went into Forbisher's and bought whatever the sales clerk told him to," Neville laughed. "That's what I would have done."
"Did he say when the wedding's to be?"
"Christmas. He said because he was worried about losing his gift by then, but he hadn't wanted to wait because if he did he'd keep thinking about buying one until he'd been thinking about it for so long that he started thinking he'd already bought it, and wouldn't find out his mistake until it was three in the morning and the wedding eight hours away."
"Christmas," Harry echoed hollowly. Maybe he'd take Arthur and Molly up on their standing invitation to spend Christmas at the Burrow after all. Except that this year there'd be a gaping hole where Ginny ought to have been, and Percy's absence would have a whole different meaning, and Hermione would probably tactfully absent herself, and… "Fuck."
"That's all right, Harry," Neville said forlornly. "Come down to the Greenhouse for Christmas Eve. We'll put up fairy lights all around and charm the snapdragons to sing carols. Maybe I can charm the nutcrackers to dance, like Gran used to."
Harry clanked his tankard against Neville's. "You're on. We can have the house elves bring us a Christmas goose and pudding."
"And spike the wassail bowl until we pass out in front of the fireplace, visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads, and wake up so hung over that we won't remember it's Christmas until Boxing Day."
"How do you know that poem, Neville? The sugarplums, I mean."
"Seamus told it to us one year, don't you remember? I always wondered what a sugarplum was."
"It's -" Harry paused, frowning, and took another drink. "Well, I don't know what it is, really. I don't think we ever had them at my house. Odd thing, that, since the Dursleys seemed to buy Dudley everything else in the world with sugar in - Neville?"
Neville was scowling down at his ale and had clearly not heard a word Harry said. After a moment he glanced up, still looking distracted. "Nothing, I think. Something Goyle said. I was saying - well, I don't know, something inane about how Christmas is a good time for weddings or something, which it really isn't if you think about it but I think I was a little upset, but then Goyle said something about how nice it'd be for Draco and Pansy to have wedding decorations and Christmas decorations and the whole family there. I thought he was talking about Draco having Pansy and his mother with him, but…"
He trailed off, looking flustered. "I think I'm reading too much into it now. Even if Goyle did know that Malfoy was going to be out by Christmas, I suppose because his father knew, why wouldn't he tell Draco?"
Adrenaline was making Harry's hands shake. "Because Lucius would have told him not to, I'd imagine. If I were making plans like that, I sure as hell wouldn't let them get back to the one person who's almost certain to get yanked into the Ministry offices and force-fed Veritaserum the minute the balloon goes up. I'd bet on the Aurors being so preoccupied with trying to pry information out of Draco that they wouldn't look at anyone else for a good few days at least, and that would give me time to go to ground somewhere, and Jesus Christ, Ron's fallen right into the damn trap."
"But Lucius wouldn't tell Goyle anyway, would he? The whole reason Goyle's not - Goyle senior, I mean - in Azkaban himself is that he gave evidence against Lucius," Neville argued.
"Neville," Harry said tightly. "You remember Lucius' trial, when Goyle senior was giving his testimony? You remember how he kept saying Haven't I said enough, is that all, can't I stop now, but he was…" The scene rose in front of Harry's eyes as clearly as if he were seeing it in a pensieve, and dear Christ, how had he not seen it before? "But he wasn't looking at the prosecutor when he said it, was he? He was looking at Malfoy."
"How can you be sure of that? That was a long time ago, Harry."
"I'm sure," Harry said firmly. "The Goyles know. And if we can find out why they know, and what they've been doing, we might be able to find Lucius and Percy."
"He looked… excited, you know?" Neville said unhappily. "Like he had a nice surprise for Draco and couldn't wait to give it to him. Fuck, Harry, this is a bad business."
"You're telling me," Harry answered, raking a hand into his hair. "God damn Lucius. That man is poisonous."
"What are we going to do?"
Harry tapped his fingertips on the table, then reached for his lager and downed the rest of it. "I'm going to owl Ron. And I'm going to talk to Malfoy when we meet tonight about lesson plans. Maybe I can find out if the Goyles have been spending a lot of money lately, or travelling a lot, or something."
"Can I help?" Neville looked anxious but determined.
"I'm tempted to have you go stand around in Diagon Alley until you bump into Goyle again, but I don't think that'd be a very good use of your time. Sit tight; Ron might want to talk to you." Harry slapped the price of the round and a fair-sized tip onto the table. "Neville… thanks."
"Any time," Neville answered with an unhappy smile as they stood to go. "Next round's on me."
A watched pot never boils, Harry thought later that evening, and through a heroic act of will managed to refrain from either checking his clock or drumming his fingers on the table.
When they were children, Harry had been convinced that Malfoy possessed some sort of supernatural gift for divining exactly what would get under Harry's skin, and now he was more convinced than ever. That the annoyingly prompt Malfoy would choose tonight of all nights to be late -
But he's not late yet. Is he? Harry wondered, and did not check the clock. It would be just his luck to check it and find that it was still ten minutes before the hour, and then he would in all probability turn something into a frog in a fit of pique.
He'd owled Ron with the information about the Goyles as soon as he and Neville got back to school. An hour later, Hedwig had returned with a note saying Thanks, mate. Tonks has already talked to the Goyles but I'll see if I can get her to go back and try again. No further information, which Harry should have expected but it galled him anyway. Stupid of him, of course Ron wasn't the only Auror working Lucius Malfoy's escape from prison, and just because Ron hadn't talked to the Goyles didn't mean that no one had; but if Tonks had talked to them and come away empty-handed…
No. I'm not wrong about this. The Goyles know where Lucius is or I'm a Cornish pixie.
But wrong or right, there was nothing he could do at the moment. He was just going to have to be patient and wait - wait until Malfoy got there, wait until more information came to light, wait until he was mummified and covered in dust and the world ended silently between one breath and the next.
Stop it, Potter, Jesus. You're twenty-five years old, have some damn patience.
Harry rose and paced irritably toward the window to stare out at the moonlight on the lake, focusing on his breathing and the light on water the way Hermione had taught him: slow, calm, in and out, and if he couldn't manage peace he could at least try for stillness. Hedwig hooted softly from her perch, shifting restlessly from foot to foot, and he reached out a hand to stroke her feathers. She fluttered anxiously and nipped him on the thumb.
"Don't worry, Hedwig," he said soothingly. "I won't turn you into a frog." And that should have been the cue for Malfoy's lazy, bored voice, saturated with that infuriating careless superiority, to ask And whom exactly are you planning to turn into a frog, Potter? from behind him; but Harry's words fell flat into a well of thick, echoless silence.
But the darkness stayed unbroken, and the silence gave no token, and the only word there spoken -
"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Harry snapped, and glared over at the clock.
It was twenty past eight.
The door to Malfoy's chambers remained stubbornly closed and silent under Harry's repeated knocks. Frustrated, he turned and headed deeper into the Dungeons.
The sound of his knock faded into a long stillness before the door to the Slytherin common room cracked open. Evangeline Bulstrode peered out at him, no more visible of her than one eye and a slender length of robes, and regarded him in wary silence.
Harry knelt down to her eye level and tried to smile reassuringly. "Hullo, Angie."
A brief, curt nod was his only answer.
"May I come in? I need to speak to Professor Malfoy and he's not in his rooms. I was wondering if he's here."
There was another long silence before the girl turned her head a little, addressing someone behind her, her gaze never leaving Harry's. "It's Professor Potter."
The sound of a brief, whispered conference reached his ears before another girl's voice floated out into the hall. "Let him in, Angie."
The door swung open - and Harry found himself staring down the metaphorical barrel of half a dozen wands in the hands of sixth- and seventh-year Slytherin girls, and the fact that they collectively represented the best Defence students in their respective years made for a cold knot in the pit of his stomach. He looked at their expressions and stayed where he was, keeping his hands in view. Behind them, the common room was empty.
"Give your wand to Angie, please, Professor," one of the seventh-years said crisply - Marjorie Blake, a Black/Malfoy cousin several times removed, who had once informed Harry that defense against the Dark Arts was women's work.
"What?"
"Give your wand to Angie, please," Marjorie repeated tightly. She did not in any way look as if she were joking, and kept her wand aimed right at his head; and Harry thought about the circumstances under which he himself had drawn his wand on a professor, and what the consequences for doing it could be, and dear God, what the hell was going on?
"What's happened?" he demanded.
Marjorie's wand lifted, just a little, in clear warning. "I'm afraid I must ask you to surrender your wand or leave the Dungeons, Professor."
Harry took a deep breath that was intended to be calming and did a poor job of it, fumed for a moment, and weighed the situation. Reaching slowly into his robes, he pulled out his wand and handed it reluctantly to the Bulstrode girl. "All right, there, I've given it over. What's going on? Where are the rest of the students?"
Evangeline skipped backward toward her housemates. "The older boys have gone to fetch the Headmaster. The rest of them are -" A sixth-year's hand on her shoulder cut her off.
"All right." Harry stood and took a step into the common room. "Whatever it is, let me help. Is Malfoy ill?"
"Please take a seat," Marjorie said in a tone that clearly indicated that, however it might have been phrased, she was not making a request. "The Headmaster will be here shortly."
Grinding his teeth in frustration, Harry sat down on the ornate couch. It was more comfortable than it looked, small consolation for having his intended cutting comments to Malfoy forestalled so thoroughly by a small group of students. He wondered if he could bribe them to tell him what was going on before the fear battering at the edges of his self-control caused him to do something that would infallibly result in six pissed-off Slytherin girls hexing him to kingdom come.
Malfoy was never late. Until tonight, when Malfoy was suddenly not merely late but apparently nonexistent, and his students were frightened to the point of drawing wands on a teacher, and bloody hell, couldn't he have waited to pull a stunt like this until his father was back behind bars and Voldemort dead? If he'd caused all this sodding uproar because he was snogging Pansy Parkinson in the Astronomy tower and had lost track of time, Harry was going to -
The door to the common room swung open and Snape stepped through, followed by three pale, skittish Slytherin boys. He shot a glance at Harry, apparently dismissed him just as quickly, and turned to the girls.
"Miss Blake. What seems to be the problem?"
Calm and controlled, in command as always. But Harry had known him too long now, and saw the tightness around his mouth and the too-quiet watchfulness in his eyes.
Fuck, Harry thought, and the common room got ten degrees colder.
And, bloody Slytherins, there was Marjorie with her chin lifted and her eyes cold and arrogant, and if that child wasn't frightened half to death and desperately relieved to see Snape, Harry would eat his wand. Why do they do that? he thought in sudden frustration.
"We were meant to have Quidditch practice three hours ago, Headmaster, and Professor Malfoy promised he'd come and help us train. He wasn't there and we couldn't find him anywhere, and we thought he'd come back but he hasn't. And now here's Professor Potter looking for him too."
Snape raised an eyebrow in Harry's direction.
"We had an appointment to go over next week's lesson plans at eight o'clock," Harry told him. "He's never been late before, but maybe he's just off with Pansy and -"
"Miss Parkinson isn't here at the moment," Snape interrupted him. "She went to a gallery opening in Edinburgh late this afternoon and isn't expected back until late tonight."
Well, bollocks. "And he didn't change his mind and go with her, you think?"
For a moment Snape looked very much like he was about to flay some hapless first-year who'd melted the bottom out of a cauldron. Clearly biting back whatever he wanted to say, he settled on "Come with me, Potter. We'll go have a look in his chambers. Perhaps he's left a note."
Harry nodded. "Angie, may I have my wand back please?"
Angie looked up at Marjorie, who gave a single, terse nod; given permission, Angie trotted over to Harry and handed him his wand. Harry took it with a brief smile and headed out the door after Snape.
Snape was well along the corridor, moving fast, robes flapping behind him like a crow's wings. Harry jogged a few paces to catch up, debating with himself about how well questions would be received. Deciding finally that silence was the better part of not being transfigured into a quaffle, he followed Snape through pools of darkness and torchlight, down a short flight of steps and past a series of lightwells cut into the high ceiling; this part of the Dungeons extended out from the rest of the castle, and the lightwells looked up into the lake. During the day they filtered sunlight through shimmering blue water and the darting shadows of fish on the floor. Harry had only come this way a few times, and found himself unsettled by the flowing currents of watery moonlight in the dark between the torches.
Snape stopped in front of Malfoy's door and tried the handle. It refused to turn.
Harry yanked out his wand and pointed it at the door. "Alohamora!"
"Potter, please," Snape said testily. "Do you really think Draco's rooms would be locked in any way that could be undone by a reasonably competent first-year?"
"They might be if he's in them," Harry argued.
"Regardless, they are not, so kindly be quiet and let me - there," Snape murmured, made a complex pass with his wand, and tapped once on the door. The door swung silently open, and the only thing Harry could see in the darkness was the faint light coming through the high windows.
"Lumos," he said, and heard his voice shake.
His wand flared into life and he followed Snape into the room. As far as he could see in the circle of wandlight, things looked much as usual, an impression confirmed when Snape lit the candles with a wave of his hand. Harry let out a breath and realized that he'd been expecting signs of a struggle, but there was nothing - Malfoy's class files were stacked as neatly as ever on the table, his bedroom door was closed, and the only thing out of place was a half-full tumbler of scotch sitting on the small table beside the couch.
"Draco?" Snape called, and Harry waited.
Silence, and wavering candlelight. Harry rarely missed things from the Muggle world, but right at the moment he was wishing desperately for a good strong overhead fluorescent that he could switch on and flood every corner of the room with light. "Malfoy! Are you here?"
Frowning, Snape went to try the knob of Draco's bedroom door. It turned easily under his hand and he went in, candlelight leaping up around him. For a long moment Harry paused, indecisive; he had no doubt that there was a reason he'd never so much as seen the inside of Draco's bedroom, and to go in now, under these circumstances, felt like more of an intrusion than he was comfortable with.
You're being an idiot, Potter, he told himself as the silence spun out without a word from Snape. Go on.
Swallowing his misgivings, he headed into Draco's bedroom.
The first thing that struck him was the windows; one on either side of the bed, huge, baroque constructions with bevelled glass set into a dozen diamond-shaped panes. Lake water pressed against them, murky in the darkness, filled with jarringly sudden flashes of silver moonlight and the dim shadows of things moving in the blackness beyond. When he tore his eyes away from the windows, the next thing he saw was that there were books everywhere - piled on the bedside table, filling floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to overflowing, set on top of the wardrobe. Newer books, books dusty with age, a whole bookshelf full of tomes that looked as if they should have crumbled into dust hundreds of years ago, more than he'd seen in any private library outside of Hermione's apartment. It occurred to him that whatever he'd been expecting Draco's room to look like, he wouldn't have guessed this.
"His broom's gone," he said.
Snape turned from glancing into the bathroom. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. Look, there's his Quidditch gear in the corner, but his broom's nowhere in sight."
"I can't find his wand either."
"So maybe he did just go somewhere," Harry observed.
"That's possible," Snape said evenly. "If he did, he took neither any of his luggage nor, from what I can tell, any of his clothes. He also took no toiletries of any sort, not even a hairbrush."
"Well, it's not as if anyone could come and snatch him out of his room, could they? Not without coming through the castle -"
"Those windows do open, Potter," Snape said absently, rummaging on the bedside table.
Harry looked dubiously at the window closest to him and saw that there was a latch on the inside. Cringing inwardly, fully expecting to drain the entire lake into the Dungeons, he reached out, unlatched one, and swung it inward. The water stayed where it was, rippling against an invisible barrier. Harry reached out and watched his hand pass through the barrier into the lake water, a cold shock against his skin. Unsettled, he drew his hand back, latched the window again, and examined his dampened cuff.
"But anyone coming in that way would get wet, and there's no water on the floor."
"Mr. Potter, did you or did you not use an Impervius charm to keep water off your glasses while playing Quidditch for seven years?"
Rather nettled, Harry answered more sharply than he meant to. "Yes, but that's my glasses, not an entire human being."
"The charm can be modified to cover a good-sized area," Snape murmured, having clearly lost interest in the conversation. Harry caught back a sigh of frustration and turned to Malfoy's desk. It was annoyingly well-organized compared to the untidy sprawl of Harry's; files were in their place, blotter squared on the writing surface, writing instruments to ready hand -
A sudden movement out of the corner of his eye made him jump back like a startled cat. Heart pounding, he leaned closer and moved aside a sheet of paper.
An elegantly folded origami crane flopped feebly on the desk's surface, trying to fly. Its head had been torn off, and there was a smear of blood down its neck and onto its wing.
"There's," Harry managed. "Severus?"
Snape was beside him in an instant, peering down at the crane, not touching it. After a long silence, he said, simply, "Well. This is not a reassuring development."
That should have been Harry's cue for wild, hysterical laughter, and another time he might give in to that, later in his rooms perhaps. But the crane was dying, slow graceful movements becoming weaker and weaker, and somehow nothing really seemed that funny at all.
"Draco used to send notes like this," Harry said tightly. "He used to pass them in class when we were kids. The cranes could fly."
"I know," Snape answered.
"But it doesn't make sense. Why would he go off with someone against his will without putting up a fight?"
"For heaven's sake, Potter, use your head," the Headmaster snapped. "There are seventy Slytherin children in these dungeons and no help closer than the Hufflepuff wing."
Harry raked his hands through his hair. "So he didn't want to put up a fight but he was bleeding and yet somehow had time to fold a fucking origami crane before he went God knows where with someone who could apparently bypass the castle wards and trusted him enough to let him take his wand? On what planet does that make sense?"
"It doesn't. Nevertheless, the only facts we have to work with are that Draco is gone, and has apparently been gone for some hours, taking only his broom and his wand, with no warning or reason and without making arrangements for his students to be looked after in his absence, and left nothing of note behind except this crane." Snape looked as angry and frustrated as Harry felt. "Reluctant as I am to involve the Ministry in this, I don't see any way in which we can deal with this by ourselves."
Harry reached out and carefully picked up the crane. Paper wings beat slowly against his palm. "I can get hold of Ron," he said. "I can get him to come out and fill him in on what's happened. I can do that."
The crane was made from smooth, fine parchment, not thin but delicate-looking, and the last movement that it made brushed across the base of Harry's thumb with a touch like a half-drawn breath.
"Perhaps you should do it, then," Snape said tonelessly, and it wasn't going to work, Harry wasn't one of his Slytherins to be bullied and shamed into icy control -
Quick footsteps sounded from outside, and then Minerva hurried into the room and closed the door securely behind her. "What's happened?" she asked crisply, taking in the room's Malfoy-less condition at a glance.
"It seems that -" Snape began.
"He's gone, Minerva," Harry told her, priding himself on the steadiness of his voice. "He took his wand and his broom but nothing else, not even clothes. I found this on his desk." He held out the headless crane, now still and lifeless in his hand.
Minerva McGonagall was many wonderful things, but Harry had never seen any indication that maternal was one of them; so it rather stunned him when she examined him shrewdly for a long moment, then sat down on the trunk at the foot of the bed, arranged her skirts neatly around her ankles, and held out her arms to him. It was even more disconcerting to suddenly find himself on his knees beside her with his arms wrapped as tightly around her waist as he could manage with his head in her lap, trembling.
"There, now, Harry," she said patiently, stroking his hair. "Oh, Severus, for heaven's sake leave the boy alone. He just needs a moment to pull himself together and he'll be right as rain."
"Really, I see no reason -" Snape began.
"Well, if you don't, it's certainly not my fault," Minerva snapped, bringing a new low point to Harry's mortification by making him feel like a little boy whose parents were talking over his head. He pulled away from her and sat up.
"I'm sorry. I'm all right."
"Are you?" she asked, eyeing him skeptically. "Yes, I think you are. That note, what does it say?"
Snape and Harry looked at each other, rather mortified.
"You haven't looked? Oh, for - give it here, Harry." Minerva unfolded the crane carefully and examined both sides. "There doesn't seem to be anything written on it. Well, I suppose that was a bit much to expect. I don't suppose we know where he might have gone, or why?"
"He might have gone to his father," Snape said bluntly, making Harry stare at him in shock.
"But -" he began hotly.
Snape held up a hand, forestalling his protest. "I find that unlikely, for various reasons, but the Ministry will not. We'll have to be prepared for the possibility that they won't help, or that they will help in a way that will prove decidedly detrimental to Draco."
Harry shook his head. "No, this is Ron, I can talk to him. Look, let me just use the fireplace in the sitting room, I'll get hold of him right now."
After a moment, Snape nodded. "Do that. Minerva, gather the staff in the lounge."
Minerva nodded, gathered her skirts, and swept silently out of the room. Harry nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to get to the fireplace.
Snape remained in the bedroom, looking down at the unfolded crane.
Five minutes later, Harry pulled his head back out of the fireplace. "He's coming," he called into the bedroom. "He said to give him half an hour."
Snape appeared in the doorway, looking far more composed than Harry felt. "Good. That should give us time to have a staff meeting."
"Draco, when he told me his father had broken out of Azkaban…" Harry looked down, hunting for words. "He was frightened. Why would he have been frightened? Lucius is his father."
Sighing, Snape rubbed his fingertips across his forehead, and Harry couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the Headmaster look tired and discouraged. "Potter, you're very young," he said quietly. "We all think, when we are young, that love is a tremendous force for good. It isn't. It is only a tremendous force."
"I don't understand."
"Draco loves his father, but he isn't blind. He knows what Lucius is, and what he's done, and what he would do given half a chance; and he knows as well that Lucius is dangerous to Draco himself no less than to anyone else."
"But -"
"But Lucius loves him, yes. Loves him and is proud of his fine, strong, clever son. Whatever it is he's planning, he'll want Draco at his side. And if Draco should choose a different path…" Snape made a small, eloquent gesture. "Lucius will not forgive that easily. Whatever Draco's ambitions might be, I don't think he intends to stand in his father's shadow for the rest of his life, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that failing to do so might result in his death."
Harry shook his head helplessly. "But he's Draco's father. His father."
"He's a Malfoy," Snape said. "And he's Slytherin. Everyone who was raised in a Hogwarts House sacrificed some part of themselves to make other parts strong, Potter, even you. Intellect at the expense of emotion, loyalty at the expense of ambition, valor at the expense of canniness. Slytherin House understands this, and we reach a point when we must choose with our eyes open. The Malfoys have chosen, both of them - and that, I think, is why Draco has cause for concern."
Harry looked angrily away. Bugger the damn Slytherins anyway, did they ever just come out and say what they meant?
"We have a staff meeting to attend," Snape reminded him abruptly, and headed past Harry toward the door. Harry rose, brushed off his knees, and followed in silence.
They were halfway to the staffroom before he realized that Snape hadn't said what Slytherins bought and at what expense, and by then it was probably too late to ask.
The staffroom was crammed full with professors all talking at once in scandalized tones. Harry hadn't gotten two steps into the room before Neville caught his elbow.
"Harry? What's happened? Minerva came round to whip us all into the staff room but she wouldn't tell us what's going on. Is it -"
"Quiet, please," Snape said, and the room fell silent at once, tense faces turning toward the Headmaster. The whole staff was there, Harry saw, except for Sybil Trelawney. He wondered if Minerva had tried to get her to come down or simply forgotten about her.
"Draco Malfoy has disappeared," Snape said without preamble, and there was a sharp chorus of gasps. "We don't know yet whether foul play was involved. An Auror will be here shortly. I must ask you to see to it that your students aren't unsettled by this, and stop as much of the inevitable gossip as you can."
"Someone's going to have to tell Pansy," Neville said quietly.
"I'll take care of that, Longbottom," Snape said, shooting him an annoyed look. "Once we have more answers, I'll reconvene the staff and give out what information I can. In the meantime, I must ask if anyone has any information at all that might bear on this occurrence."
The professors looked blankly at each other. In the corner, Argus Filch frowned as if his lack of knowledge was a personal affront, and glanced down at Mrs. Norris as though expecting her to contribute something.
"Nothing?" Snape asked finally. "No one saw anyone on the grounds who isn't usually here? No one heard Malfoy say anything that might be relevant?"
"He doesn't talk to us much, does he?" Professor Flitwick noted without rancor. "Poor lad, he keeps to himself. I think Potter there's had more contact with him than any of the rest of us have."
"I don't know anything," Harry said, angry at how true it was.
"Please consider carefully, all of you," Snape said, and the ghost of that heavy weariness was back in his voice. "Anything at all that strikes you, no matter how foolish or insignificant it seems. If anything should occur to you later, please come and tell me."
"Severus," Professor Vector spoke up. "Lucius Malfoy breaks out of Azkaban and a few days later his son vanishes without a trace. Is that -"
"We don't know," Snape interrupted. "What evidence we have could point to any number of things."
"The students aren't stupid, most of them. They'll make that connection."
"Then you will tell them what I've told you. I ask again - does anyone have any information at all that might help us find out what happened?"
There was a long, uncomfortable silence before Poppy Pomfrey cleared her throat. "After all, he's young," she said in a tone that was a bit too dubious to be reassuring. "It might be nothing, mightn't it? He could be back in the morning, surprised that anyone noticed he was gone."
"He could be," Snape answered. "But it's unlikely."
"Shall I ask about in the Forest?" Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank offered.
"Please do, and let me know immediately if anything comes to light." Snape looked around at the assembled teachers, mouth thinning for a moment in frustration. "If no one has anything to offer at the moment, the meeting is adjourned. The Auror will be here shortly."
No one did. The meeting broke up in subdued quiet; Neville gave Harry's shoulder a squeeze and slipped out to catch up to Wilhelmina.
Harry invited himself back to the Headmaster's office. Rather to his surprise, Snape did not object.
Ron was waiting for them outside the staircase, looking grim. "Scarpered, has he?" he asked bluntly, in a tone that held no surprise at all, and the anger that flared in Harry at it was so sudden and sharp that he had to stop and take a deep breath.
"He's gone," Snape answered. "Whether he has, as you put it, 'scarpered' remains to be seen. I doubt it, personally."
Ron gave him a distinctly skeptical look, but followed him up to the office without further argument.
"Have you got any leads on Lucius and Percy?" Harry asked, settling into one of the chairs before the desk.
"No," Ron answered. "Not yet. I'll find them, though."
"Did he keep notes from his interviews with Lucius?"
Ron gave a short, bitter laugh and rubbed his hand over his eyes. "Yeah, I thought the same thing. So I went to Fudge's office and asked to see them, and you know what I found out? They didn't bloody keep them. None of the notes Percy took over all those visits to Azkaban. They were 'sensitive materials,' Fudge said, so he handed them over to some underling to summarize and destroyed the originals. I asked him which underling and he sent me to some slack-jawed eighteen-year-old Hufflepuff who summarized months worth of notes into one bloody paragraph that was about as informative as a shopping list. He didn't remember one word that Percy wrote. When I got shirty with him about it he said that he summarized documents all day and by quitting time he just wanted to go down the pub and meet his girlfriend and not have other people's reports swimming in front of his eyes all night."
Harry fought the urge to bury his face in his hands. "Didn't Fudge remember anything in them?"
"Fudge didn't read them," Ron answered. "Or if he did, he barely skimmed through them. He tried to pretend he knew all about them and just didn't want to tell me, but he couldn't even keep dates straight, or the names of the Death Eaters Percy had talked to. He had no idea that after about the middle of April, aside from one visit to Bellatrix Lestrange, Percy never talked to anyone but Lucius Malfoy. I had to get that from the Azkaban guards."
"That makes no sense," Snape said in the iron tones of a man intent upon imposing sense on the world by sheer force of will. "Why would the Ministry have sent him there if they weren't doing anything with the intelligence he brought back?"
"Hermione thinks they sent him there because they were hoping to find out that there was nothing left of the Death Eaters, and this new business with the Dark Mark popping up doesn't mean that Voldemort is coming back," Harry told him. "Or that they were covering themselves, so if something happens and the Ministry comes under fire they could say that they'd had someone investigating all the time."
"She's probably right, too," Ron said. "But we've gotten off on a tangent. How long has Malfoy been missing? Your Malfoy, I mean."
Harry glanced at Snape, then back at Ron. "I saw him around eleven-thirty. Where he went after that I don't know, but he was supposed to have Quidditch practice with the Slytherin team this evening and he didn't show. That would have been around five if they kept to their usual schedule."
"I met with him at two-thirty," Snape added. "We spoke until around three."
"That only leaves a two-hour window," Ron observed. "In broad daylight. And he just vanished without a trace? No one saw anything?"
"I've spoken to the faculty and staff already," Snape said. "No one saw anything, or nothing that they immediately recalled."
Ron shook his head. "I need to see Malfoy's rooms."
"Very well," Snape answered, and did not look pleased.
It was past curfew now and the halls were dark and silent, which came as something of a relief to Harry; he liked his students, but all this was quite stressful enough without having to fight his way to Malfoy's door through five hundred goggling children. They took the route Harry was accustomed to taking, and he was a little disturbed to realize that he could have found the way to Malfoy's rooms with his eyes closed.
Snape unlocked the door and stood back to let Ron step through. Harry followed, watching as Ron lit the candles and moved around the room, stopping to carefully examine the tumbler of whiskey.
"Is this about how much Malfoy usually drank?"
"A little more than his usual, I should think," Snape answered.
"Did he usually leave cups sitting out like this?"
"I never saw any," Harry answered. "But he didn't usually offer me a drink, and when he did I… I always left before he was done with his, or almost always. I don't think he drinks much at a time."
"The Malfoys do rather run to hangovers," Snape said with a brief flash of rather bleak humor.
Harry wanted to ask and didn't. Ron was still looking at him as though Harry had said something he hadn't liked; Harry wondered uneasily what it was.
"How much did you disturb the things in his bedroom?" he asked finally, and headed for the bedroom door.
"Not much," Snape answered. "The only thing that's not as it was is a paper crane that Potter found on the desk. Minerva unfolded it."
"This?" Ron asked once he'd waved the candles lit, kneeling on the floor next to the parchment.
"Yes," Harry answered. "That's blood on it. You remember how Malfoy used to make them fly? This one… its head had been ripped off and it was still moving a little."
Ron nodded absently, and Harry remembered the yard full of chickens at the Burrow. Of course something like that wouldn't be as disturbing to Ron as it had been to Harry. "And you didn't find his wand or his broom?"
"No," Snape answered. "But nothing else seems to be missing."
"Right," Ron said absently, and set about searching Malfoy's bedroom.
It took him an interminably long time. Snape stood with his hands clasped behind his back, patient and unmoving; Harry, unable to sit still, prowled around the sitting room examining the paintings on the walls until he could close his eyes and reproduce every detail against the darkness. Why the hell couldn't Malfoy have had portraits that moved? Maybe they would have seen something, would have told something.
Which, of course, would be why Malfoy didn't have them. Harry had never been in Snape's rooms, but he would have been prepared to bet that the Headmaster didn't have any portraits either. He wished that he smoked so he could occupy himself chain-smoking his way through an entire pack.
Just as he was ready to yank Ron out of Malfoy's bedroom by the scruff of the neck and shake him until answers fell out, Ron reappeared in the doorway, looking dissatisfied. "Does Malfoy usually keep his letters?"
"I should imagine not," Snape answered.
"Not much of a one for photos either, it looks like."
"No," Snape replied. "You found nothing out of place?"
Ron blew his hair out of his eyes with an exasperated puff. There was a smear of dust on his nose. "Do you know how to open that trunk?"
Snape lifted an eyebrow. "I assumed there was a key."
"If there is, I can't find it, and I can't figure out the trunk's wardings."
Drawing his wand, Snape went into the bedroom and knelt by the trunk. Harry and Ron crowded into the door behind him.
For several minutes, Snape only ran his wand over the trunk, feeling his way through the wards. Twice he muttered an incantation; the first one had no effect at all, and the second produced only a brief shower of sparks. Finally he sat back and shook his head. "Potter, you're going to have to come and look at this."
Harry went to sit by the trunk and pulled out his wand. A minute's testing told him why Snape had turned the task over to him - the wards were a more complex variant of the protective wardings he and Draco taught their seventh-year NEWT students, the ones that could be used to ensnare and slow or stop an approaching enemy, and Harry was better than Snape at Defence.
Unfortunately, it looked from the complexity of the wardings as though Draco might be better than both of them.
The wardings on the trunk were thick-layered; Harry suspected that there was a command word that disabled them, but it would be set by the caster, and without knowing it he'd have to work his way through them to the center and disable them from the lowest layer out. He whispered a soft riff of Latin and made a pass over the trunk with his wand, managing to open a small rift in the first layer; but the second-layer spell caught him immediately, latching onto his arm and slowing his movements. Cold crept up from his fingertips to his forearm, and he pulled back with a muttered curse. "This is going to take time."
"Keep on, Harry," Ron said encouragingly.
Harry tried again, moving faster this time, trying to get an opening in the second layer before it caught him; he nearly managed it before first and second layer both closed on him, sending a bolt of cold all the way up to his elbow and slowing his fingers so much that he could barely move his wand. "Damn it! What could he possibly have in here that wants this much guarding?"
"Well, it isn't as if he has to try to break into the trunk every time he wants into it," Snape pointed out unhelpfully.
"Can't you help?" Ron asked him sharply.
"No. Removing wards isn't something two people ought to be trying to do at the same time, as you would know had you at any point in your education had a competent Defence professor, and Potter is better qualified than I to make the attempt."
"I always thought you wanted that job," Ron said, sounding surprised. Harry rolled his sleeves up and took a couple of breaths, preparing to work faster.
"I wanted to ensure that the students had an adequate education in the subject, because I knew too well what could be in store for the ignorant and the unprepared," Snape said quietly. "I couldn't have replaced a fully trained and competent Defence professor, but anything would have been better than the dregs of the wizarding world with whom the previous Headmaster seemed intent on filling the position."
The wards closed faster this time, frustrating Harry into grinding his teeth. He pulled his arm back and shook it, trying to shake out the cold.
"Any luck, there, Harry?" Ron asked hopefully.
Harry refrained from snapping at him, but only barely. "These wards slow you down. By the time I get one layer disabled it's slowed me so much that the second layer has time to activate and tangle me up. I can't breach more than the top layer or so, and as the wards are they'll have rendered me immobile long before I get to the latch."
"Keep trying, Potter," Snape ordered.
Harry closed his eyes and took two or three breaths, preparing. On a long exhale he began the incantation, whispering as fast as he could without tripping over the words, pushing his wand hand Seeker-fast through the movements; the first level parted under him, then the second - cold reaching his fingertips and inching up, and he whispered faster - the third layer breaching to expose a weak spot in the fourth that Harry aimed for without thinking -
- and a ward he hadn't seen between the third and fourth activated, throwing him hard backward onto the floor.
Harry stared up at the ceiling and reviewed the situation. His arm was freezing nearly up to the shoulder, and it was taking longer each time for the slowness to dissipate. There seemed to be at least two or three more ward levels he hadn't reached yet, and it was painfully obvious that he wasn't going to be able to at this rate.
"All right, Harry?" Ron asked dubiously.
"Oh, fine, fine," Harry answered, not moving from his prone position. There had to be another way to get through. Come on, dammit. Think like a Slytherin. There can't be only one way.
There was a stylized serpent wrought into the stone of the ceiling so subtly that he his eyes had been following its shape for a good thirty seconds before he realized what it was. There has to be a way. Think like a Slytherin.
Think like a Malfoy.
"The lost kingdom of Ys had better be in this trunk," he told the snake.
"Well, we've got the weather for it, haven't we," Ron commented, nodding toward the window.
Harry sat up and rubbed the back of his head, glowering at the trunk and the absent Malfoy. Bollocks, he always was a pain in the -
The Inquisitorial squad in their fifth year. Courting Snape's favoritism. Never quite being rude to Remus. Pansy Parkinson in the one paired Divination class they'd had, making fun of Sybil Trelawney to her face with such deadpan earnest that Sybil had glowed with pleasure at Pansy's enthusiasm. Slytherins were serpents who bent and twisted and conquered from the inside, and were bad at head-on attacks but skilled at sidestepping them and tripping the attacker when they came.
Harry frowned thoughtfully at the trunk and began the incantation again, this time moving as slowly as he could.
The first layer of wards responded like a guard animal lulled into unawareness, parting slowly away from the second. Frost touched the tips of Harry's fingers, but went no further. Encouraged, Harry went to work on the second layer - but the cold, it became quickly clear, was moving faster now, and it was no longer as difficult to keep his movements slow. Down further, another layer opened and moved aside, and the chill was up to his elbow now and moving up. By the time he got to the bottom, even at this rate, he might not be able to move at all.
By the time he got within two layers of the core, the warmth was leached out of his whole body, he couldn't make his lungs work fast enough to breathe properly, and he wasn't sure if he'd be able to get back out if he tried.
"Harry?" Ron asked nervously. Harry tuned him out and pushed down the growing alarm and dizziness. One more layer, God it was cold, if he ever saw Malfoy again he was going to beat the command word out of him with a Quidditch bat.
His heartbeat was starting to slow.
Cold wrapped around him like a suffocating fog, weighing him down, making even thinking difficult. He wanted to go to sleep, wanted to give in to the cold and the heaviness - it was so much effort just to move his hand that it seemed that there was no energy left over to keep the rest of him going. He found his thoughts drifting, and with a huge effort of will he focused on the spell again - and the final layer was open to him at last. Spots were blooming in great dark blotches in his field of vision; holding tight to the task at hand, he whispered a dispelling charm. The lowest ward layer vanished, and the cold slowness eased its grip on him a little.
Still moving as slowly as he could, he backed up to the second-to-last layer and dispelled it, working his way back up. After two layers he could breathe again and his heart began pounding in his ears; two more, and the cold had retreated all the way back down to his hands. Then he was on the last layer, and if that bastard had booby-trapped this somehow so that trying to dispel the last layer brought the whole ward structure back Harry was going to gut him like a sturgeon.
One more dispelling charm and the wards vanished. Harry collapsed forward, coughing and nearly retching and feeling as though someone's fingers had just been pried off his throat.
"Harry, my God, are you all right?" Ron slung an arm around him and dragged him back away from the trunk. "Bloody hell, what was Malfoy thinking?"
"That he didn't want anyone getting into his trunk, I daresay," Snape said dryly. He turned to go back into the sitting room and reappeared a minute later to hand a tumbler of scotch to Harry. Harry took it gratefully and took a swallow, scalding his throat into warmth again.
Ron snapped open the trunk latch and lifted the lid. The three of them gathered around it, peering down. "Well, no lost kingdoms, and I don't see any dead bodies," Ron commented.
The trunk's contents were relatively few: a stack of potions texts so old that they might as well have been written on Dead Sea scrolls, a set of photographs of Draco's family, and - the apparent reason for the wardings - a large velvet bag that spilled galleons out onto the bed in a flow of sparkling gold. There was more money by far in the bag than a Hogwarts professor made in a year.
"Not even a Malfoy would walk off and leave that much money behind," Harry commented.
Ron gave him a skeptical look. "No? It's not as if it was just lying around in a drawer, was it?"
Harry's mouth twisted in exasperation and he began scooping the coins back into the bag. "Ron, listen. I'm not the Auror here -"
Ron flinched a little at that. Harry wished he wouldn't. He'd stopped wanting to be an Auror long before he left the program and had no regrets, but Ron always seemed to harbor a bit of survivor's guilt.
"But it seems to me that there are only so many possibilities. Malfoy's left here of his own accord to join his father; he's left of his own accord to join Voldemort; he's been kidnapped by his father, by Voldemort, or by both; or he's had some sort of minor breakdown and gone to sit in a pub and sulk somewhere and he'll be back in the morning."
"Do you think that's likely?" Snape asked rather sharply.
Harry's hands paused on the galleons. "No," he answered quietly. "I don't think he went anywhere of his own free will. Not like this, not throwing the whole school into an uproar and leaving seventy Slytherin kids frightened and unprotected. Not without making an excuse, and he had the perfect one, didn't he? He could have said he was going into Edinburgh to the gallery opening Pansy went to, and he could have bought himself a good twelve hours' head start."
There was blood on the crane. Not much, but there was blood.
"Either way, he's either with his father or You-Know-Who or both," Ron observed. "We'll have to find them to find him. Or else finding him will lead us to them."
"I don't think Lucius has gone back to serve Voldemort, Ron," Harry said. "I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I don't think he has."
"Why not?"
Harry looked away. "I know how this sounds, but I feel like I have to trust Percy that far. I have to believe that if Lucius were really still Voldemort's lapdog, Percy would have known. I don't think I can explain it any better than that."
"That's an unconvincing proposition, Potter, if I may say so," Snape commented.
It was, and Harry knew it. But five years before, he'd sent Hedwig to Percy in the middle of the night with a note with neither salutation nor signature that said Help me. I don't know what to do and I don't have anywhere else to go. Please, you were my friend once. And the next day Fred and George had come for him, laughing and boisterous, with ingenuous expressions and a story about a surprise party for Ron; the day after that he'd sat in front of the Wizengamot and talked until his throat felt like sandpaper. He couldn't repay what Percy had done for him by not believing now that Percy thought he was doing the right thing.
"If he's with his father -" Ron began.
" - then he may well be in danger, but not immediate danger," Snape said. "If he is with Voldemort, he will either shortly be dead or is dead already."
"Even if Lucius is with You-Know-Who too?"
"If he is - which, like Potter, I doubt, though for different reasons - then Lucius will be able to shield his son for a while. But the time will come, and shortly, when Draco will have to either take the Mark and swear eternal servitude to a madman or die."
"What's going on?"
Harry dropped the money bag, nearly spilling the galleons out of it again, and looked past Snape to see Pansy standing white-faced in the door, tiny against the heavy oak frame and looking far too young in the candlelight.
"What are all of you doing here? Where's Draco?" she demanded.
Snape took the bag from Harry, dropped it into the trunk, and closed the lid. "See to it that you reset those wards, Potter," he said quietly. "Pansy, come with me."
Numbly, Harry did as he was told.
"Oh, I'll find him, don't worry," Ron said grimly when they'd gotten back up to the Tower and Harry's rooms. "Money or no, he won't be able to disappear for long."
"I really don't think he did it on purpose, Ron," Harry said, barely able to keep from snapping at him. He'd had the most bloody awful day in years, and now Ron was refusing to see sense, and Harry's temper had never been one of his better qualities. He grabbed a pair of tumblers and a bottle from the drinks cabinet.
"There were no signs of a struggle."
"There was blood on that crane, Ron."
"Blood that could have come from anywhere," Ron pointed out. "We don't even know that it was Malfoy's. Hell, he could have cut himself shaving."
The tumblers rattled when Harry set them on the table, and he clenched his jaw, trying to stop his hands from shaking so he could pour the firewhiskey. "Make sure that you have a way clear to bring him back here as soon as you've found him. I'll make sure that Poppy's stocked up on medicine in case he's hurt, and we can shore up the wards and hide him until -"
"Harry," Ron said quietly.
"Ron, no," Harry said through gritted teeth.
"Harry -"
Suddenly furious, Harry let go of the tumblers and turned to Ron. "No, Ron! You don't know him, you haven't been here, you -"
"I don't know him?" Ron asked incredulously. "Harry, I grew up with him! He's been a Death Eater in training his whole life, he worships the ground that bloody father of his walks on, he's nasty and cruel and -"
"Ron, stop," Harry said in despair, rubbing at his eyes underneath his glasses. "Just... Look, I'm not saying he's turned into Neville since we left school, all right? He's impatient and irritating and the worst bloody snob I've ever seen, and he's got a tongue like a razor; but when Angie Bulstrode fell off her broom and broke her leg he came out to the Quidditch pitch and sat with her until Poppy got there, and she was scared and I couldn't get her to calm down but he did it with a word and a look."
"And he got Hagrid sacked, did you forget about that?"
"How did he do that, Ron?" Harry cried, furious with himself for defending Malfoy at Hagrid's expense and furious with Ron for forcing him to. "Did he hold a wand at Hagrid's head and make him haul out those godforsaken skrewts again? Did he push that little girl in front of them and bloody near melt her jumper to her chest?"
"So what are you saying, that Hagrid deserved to get sacked?"
"Fuck, Ron, maybe I'm saying I'm tired of being twelve years old!" Harry shouted. "Maybe I want to think there's something in Draco worth saving. Maybe I want to really open my eyes and see what's going on around me instead of drawing lines and sorting people into nice comfortable compartments. Maybe I want - "
"Maybe you want Malfoy," Ron said quietly.
Harry felt the blood drain out of his face. "No," he managed after a moment. "No, you've got the wrong -"
"God, Harry, are you in love with him?"
"No! No. But..." Harry swallowed hard. "But I'm not going to let him disappear like this. Not like this."
Ron took a deep breath, pulled a chair to him, and sat down straddling the back. "Okay, this is me being the loving and supportive friend instead of hauling you off to St. Mungo's like I ought to. How long has this thing with Malfoy been going on? And for God's sake, does Pansy know?"
Harry rubbed at his forehead, trying futilely to massage away his headache. "There's no 'thing,' Ron. There never has been. I just can't believe that he'd willingly give his service to one Dark Lord after walking away from another, even if it is his own father."
"Harry..." Ron looked down at the back of the chair and picked carefully at it with his fingernail. "Listen to me. Are you listening?"
"I'm listening."
"You and Hermione, you were raised by Muggles; and no matter what happens to you, there are things you aren't ever going to understand, not deep down where the rest of us understand them. Hermione always snapped at me for saying You-Know-Who instead of saying his name... but it was easy for her, you know? She didn't grow up in his shadow. She didn't listen to her older brothers telling stories about how when they were little it wasn't safe to play outside. She didn't grow up hearing tales about Muggle-born wizards being dragged out of their houses and strung up from trees in their yards, whole families hung from branches and left for the crows, when they weren't just trapped in their houses and the houses set on fire. She didn't see her parents afraid when parents weren't supposed to be afraid of anything. She didn't learn to be afraid herself, afraid right down to the bone, and somehow deep down I don't think she ever knew why we were. Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason Dumbledore sent you to be raised as a Muggle wasn't so that you'd be too ignorant to be afraid the way the rest of us were." "Ron..." Harry said softly.
"No, let me finish," Ron said stubbornly. "Hermione doesn't know, and you don't know either, that being a Pureblood meant that it could be your cousins out there making people slip on their own intestines, and they might do it to you too if you said the wrong thing in the wrong ear. You trusted your parents, your kids, and your siblings, and that was it, and sometimes people... sometimes people paid for that trust with their lives too." He ran a hand over his face, looking suddenly exhausted. "Come on, mate, light a fire under those drinks, would you?"
Harry turned hurriedly back to the table and poured a tumbler full of whiskey for each of them.
"Cheers," Ron said as he reached out for his drink. His hand was shaking just a little. "Remember at the Quidditch Cup when the Dark Mark appeared? You and Hermione saw scary lights in the sky. I saw people we'd had classes with for the last three years dragging Hermione screaming out of the common room and splattering her brains all over the floor of the Great Hall."
Harry's own hands were none too steady. Whiskey slopped over the side of his cup onto his wrist, and he swiped at it with his sleeve.
"You know why I'm telling you this?"
"No," Harry said, and his voice sounded strange in his own ears.
"I'm telling you so you'll understand two things. The first is that Purebloods have always been big on family and lineage; but in You-Know-Who's day and after, family loyalty became everything, in Death Eater families just like the rest of us. You had to stick together, you had to, because it wasn't safe to trust anyone else. The second thing is that half the wizarding world would greet a new Dark Lord with bent necks and open arms if his name wasn't... wasn't Voldemort. Especially if he rose to power over the old Dark Lord's dead body." Ron knocked back a large gulp of whiskey. "Lucius Malfoy is... bloody hell, when I think what I sound like saying this, but he's one of us, in a way. Old wizarding family, all of them been at Hogwarts since it was founded. And he might be a murdering sociopathic bastard but he's a damn charismatic one. It wasn't just his gold and his hexes that made people at the Ministry fall all over themselves to do what he wanted."
"What's all this in aid of, Ron?" Harry asked tightly.
Ron stared down into the whiskey, then downed the rest of it and set the glass down with a clunk on the coffee table. "It's in aid of you understanding a little better when I say that I don't believe for a minute that Malfoy's done anything but walk out of here of his own free will to join his father. I think he's taken everything he knows about the wards at Hogwarts and everything he's managed to learn about you, and I think he's going to hand that information over to Lucius. And I think the next time you see him he'll be Lucius' right-hand man." He made a wry face. "Well, he doesn't bloody need a Dark Mark, does he? That hair of his is mark enough."
"You're wrong," Harry said quietly. "You're wrong about him."
"Harry," Ron said, lifting his head to look Harry dead in the eye. "I'm going to find Malfoy. I'm going to bring him back here and throw him so deep in Azkaban that even the torchlight won't reach him, before he can do any more damage than he already has. You're my best mate, you've been like a brother to me for fourteen years, but I'll tell you this right now: step between me and Malfoy and you're going to be sorry."
Harry closed his eyes and turned away.
There was a strained silence for a minute before Ron pushed the chair forward and stood. "Well," he said softly. "Mum always told me to leave before I wore out my welcome. Night, Harry."
"Night, Ron," Harry whispered.
Ron paused for a moment with his hand on the doorknob and glanced back; but Harry couldn't find the right words to wrap fourteen years of friendship up for safekeeping, and neither could Ron, and in the end Ron opened the door and left.
